One of those slightly odd, off-kilter, personality-plus studio products of the 1930s that no one ever thought to give awards to, Henry Hathaway's Souls at Sea (1937) is also the era's great forgotten bromance, not as lavish as Hathaway's The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) or boisterous as George Stevens's Gunga Din (1939), but poetic and righteous and lively. At the heart of it are Gary Cooper and George Raft as two sailors shanghai-ed at first into illegal slave-trading and then in a covert British Empire operation to infiltrate the international slave markets and disrupt them. But the counter-casting is fascinating: it's Cooper who's the smart, bookish one, and Raft who's the irreverent dummy, and the spectacle of seeing both men forced out of their comfort zones is more entertaining than the plot. Cooper is not any more comfortable with verbal communication than he ever was, but here he's compelled to quote poetry and lackadaisically exhibit a robust classical education, and the dialectic succeeds in evoking the character's perpetual fish-out-of-water status, never quite synched with the world whether he's on trial for murder (which is how the film begins), working on a slave ship, or lying as a spy. Raft's task is simpler: forget about the tough guy routine for once, making his dee's-doh's-dem's holy fool the movie's de facto comic relief.

Bromances were serious business in the '30s, for whatever reason Hollywood had for being so passionate about the friendship between a film's leading man and his best bud, which though hardly ever overtly sexual often seems stronger and deeper than the romance either will have with a female cast member. (In fact, the 1997 documentary about gay codes in Gold Age movies The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender, expressly references Souls at Sea.) Here, the suggestions are very romantic: the two men sharing a bunk, singing "Susie Sapple" together (at one point, after being hung by their thumbs from the yardarm as slave traders, putting on a private play together with their bandages as thumb puppets), lying side by side on the ship deck talking in a virtual cuddle, nicknaming each other Nuggin and Powdah, and so on. This needn't discombobulate anyone; what's labeled "homoerotic" subtext in old, factory-produced films actually plays today more like standard Hollywood hyperbolization, the same kind of cosmic and effusive emotionalism that makes straight romances transcend death, that make childhood bonds a matter of life or death later in life, that permit perfect strangers to be "destined" for each other, etc. The tone and approach is a remnant of Victorian-era pop-culture Romanticism, which prized emotional intuition and unscientific ethos over reason and practicality - but here it's something for the boys and men in the audience, transforming their ideas of friendship into a more Blakean, Brontean wonder. It's also fuel for a good story - raising the stakes beyond how one character or another "feels" by holding the relationship itself as a holy, free-standing virtue.

Hathaway, in any case, was a man's man filmmaker (although in 1935 he did, with Cooper, make Peter Ibbetson, one of early Hollywood's most rhapsodic fantasy-romances), and Souls at Sea has plenty of genre gravity: rich historical detail, thick gouts of earnest anti-slavery cant, and intricate plot-making, climaxing on a lifeboat in which, with shades of a truly nightmarish version of the 1957 Tyrone Power suspenser Abandon Ship!, Cooper must literally shoot the drowners that try to hang on, in order to save as many as possible and not just let everyone die. (Hence the murder trial.) Along the way, perfectly lovely subplots develop, centered on Olympe Bradna's lowly pan-Euro ladies' maid, who first bonds with inadvertent bunkmate Frances Dee, as an aristocratic bride-to-be, and then gets wooed by Raft's fumbling swell, and it's this couple's denouement, on a sinking ship filling with water, that seizes the film's most inspired, and most Romantic, moment.

Souls at Sea should also be remembered for its fierce abolitionist stance - Cooper's lost boy is bashful except in the presence of the film's evil traders, at whom he spits bile - which in 1930s Hollywood was not as reflexive as we'd think. Simply consider the preponderance of the decade's movies, only perhaps culminating with Gone with the Wind (1939), which waxed with nostalgia for the slave-owning South and which sought only to idealize and sanitize it as history. Search in vain for another film made in those years that takes as righteous a stance on the matter, or any at all. (Overt abolitionism may well have hampered a film's box office potential in the South). Sure, Hathaway's movie expends much more time on the shipboard romances and on the stars' wistful friendship than on racial politics, but the hot kernel of anger is there, and it might just make the film a heretofore unrecognized social-issues landmark, stumping for the inhumanity of slavery culture in the "nadir" days of race relations, the "sundown town" phenomenon, official segregation, and rampant violence. Souls at Sea has only a single scene with a few African-American extras in it and no black speaking parts, but in its day it stood alone on principles.

Producer: Henry Hathaway, Grover Jones, Adolph Zukor
Director: Henry Hathaway
Screenplay: Grover Jones, Ted Lesser, Richard Talmadge, Dale Van Every
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Editing: Ellsworth Hoagland
Art Direction: Roland Anderson, Hans Dreier
Music: W. Franke Harling, Milan Roder
Costume Design: Edith Head
Cast: Gary Cooper (Michael 'Nuggin' Taylor), George Raft (Powdah), Frances Dee (Margaret Tarryton), Henry Wilcoxon (Lt. Stanley Tarryton), Harry Carey (Captain of the William Brown), Olympe Bradna (Babsie), Robert Cummings (George Martin), Porter Hall (Court Prosecutor), George Zucco (Barton Woodley), Virginia Weidler (Tina).
BW-92m.

by Michael Atkinson